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NICE, France — Patrick Chan’s athletic hero, Tiger Woods, got in trouble early in his PGA Tour career for saying he had won a tournament without his A-game.

He was only being honest, but his fellow pros were not amused.

Well, Chan got through the first stage of his title defence at the world figure skating championships Friday, admittedly without his very best form, and he’s in the lead after the men’s short program.

If anyone is ticked, they’re not talking.

But it was another head-scratcher to some — not unlike Thursday’s mystified audience reaction at the Palais des Expositions when Canada’s Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir won the ice dancing crown with a slightly underwhelming free dance.

The explanation, no doubt, is that these Canadians are just damned good, and so well-schooled in the arcana of the scoring system that they know how to pile up huge component marks even when the magic isn’t there.

But “Meh!” isn’t exactly the desired reaction from a crowd witnessing a winning skate, and Chan, like Virtue and Moir, is accustomed to bringing the house down.

Friday he was ... um, pretty good, and earned a season’s best score of 89.41 to stand not quite two points clear of Czech Michal Brezina, with Japan’s 2010 world champ Daisuke Takahashi almost four back — an insignificant difference, a jump made or missed, with the long program to come. None of the top three completed a clean quad-triple combination.

France’s 2007 world champion Brian Joubert, wildly cheered by the home crowd, did land the quad-triple but was placed fourth, six points behind Chan and just ahead of Brian Orser’s Spanish skater, Javier Fernandez.

Coquitlam’s Kevin Reynolds stood in 12th place

The crowd’s reaction to Joubert was so loud, Chan couldn’t help but hear it.

“Luckily he wasn’t in my group. Whoo!” said Chan. “I know he did quad-toe. I’m happy for him. He’s had kind of a funny season, but he made the best out of it and for him to do it here in France, it’s a big deal. He’s a great guy, great skater.”

After a rough landing of his own quad, Chan elected to add the triple toe on the end of a Lutz later in the program. In between, his triple Axel was solid, but he lost his balance twice in quick succession on a footwork sequence near the end and, though he recovered each time with a sort of “I meant to do that” facial expression, it was clear that he was mildly out of sorts.

He tried to pass the slips off as choreography, as Moir had done half-jokingly with his own stumble the night before, but he didn’t make the sale.

“Oh, I’m buying it, totally,” Moir said, grinning, a couple of hours after Chan’s skate. “The guy’s a magician out there. He can do anything.”

It was, to the say the least, an adventure.

“Oh always, with Patrick,” said Chan’s coach Christy Krall. “As he says, if you’re not on the edge, you’re taking up too much space. So that was one of those moments.”

As with Virtue and Moir, the pressure of being favoured and fully trained and without any excuses can be daunting, and trying to be the first to repeat as world champion since Switzerland’s Stephane Lambiel in 2006 just added to the weight for the 21-year-old from Toronto, who looked apprehensive before his music started.

“It’s a different kind of pressure,” Virtue said Friday. “I think it’s great he has a chance to experience it before [the 2014 Olympics in] Sochi. Because it’s absolutely a different feeling when you step on the ice and you’re defending your title.”

“The other thing that’s different about him compared to us is, he’s dominated men’s figure skating the last two years. He’s been untouchable, and that’s a lot of pressure,” said Moir. “But we can see him mature as a skater and a person, so hopefully that carries on through the next Olympics.”

Chan admitted there was a feeling — he used the word “entitlement” but seemed to mean “responsibility” — that he owed the crowd a performance worthy of a world champion, and knew he hadn’t quite delivered it. He wasn’t expecting a season’s best score.

“No, I really doubted it, not because of the quad-toe, it was mostly for the footwork,” he said. “The program’s not done till it’s really done so I was kind of upset for letting myself go like that. But you know what? I looked at it on video and it was great, I played with it, the expression on my face was priceless.

“I started going forwards and I lost my balance. Changed to backwards, trying to see if that would help but it didn’t help. But it was fine. It’s like muscle memory kicking in at that point [to save it], and body core strength as well.”

Ditching the quad combination was not a problem, because it’s always Plan B if the landing is a little rough, and he practices both scenarios all the time.

“Christy and I usually discuss it and make a decision before I even go out,” Chan said. “But I’ve done this for so long now it’s something I can do going off my own intuition, just feeling it.

“Thank goodness for [training at] altitude, I have the stamina to put it on the last jump and have enough flow out of the Lutz to do a triple toe. It works out.”

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Patrick Chan on top, not in form, at world figure skating championships

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